Defense of ‘China’s Fauci’ Censored by Beijing After Zero-COVID Reversal
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China Rolls Back Zero-COVID Policy In Stunning Reversal After Protests
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Censors on the Chinese internet scrubbed a widely shared op-ed in the past week in which an anonymous author defended the unpopular advice of a trusted public health expert known as “China’s Fauci,” who openly contradicted Beijing’s zero-COVID policy more than a year ago.
Zhang Wenhong, whose frank assessments of COVID-19 led to comparisons to Dr. Anthony Fauci, remains one of China’s top infectious disease specialists. Last summer, however, Chinese nationalists threatened to hound him from public view after he suggested in a social media post that China, like the rest of the world, would have to learn to live with the virus.
At the time, facing the deadlier Delta variant, China stuck to its zero-tolerance approach and stamped out each cluster that reached local communities, a strategy largely favored by the public when deaths were still rising in the West and vaccination rates were low.
Zhang, head of the infectious diseases department at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, wasn’t calling for China to immediately reopen in 2021, but he was roundly criticized for a July 29 Weibo post in which he pointed out the expert community’s consensus that COVID was here to stay: “The world needs to learn to coexist with the virus.”
Criticism came from nationalist circles and appeared to be validated by Gao Qiang, China’s former health minister, who penned an editorial in People’s Daily, the top Communist Party newspaper, expressing his surprise at some in the country who had advocated for the Western approach of “blindly removing” COVID measures. Others online accused Zhang, 53, of “pandering to foreign ideas” in a social media storm that lasted two months.
It was perhaps the first sign that President Xi Jinping’s public health campaign had become overly politicized.
The recent op-ed, published on December 8, after Beijing suddenly pivoted away from the zero-COVID policy, said criticism of Zhang’s advice “cost us one year.” Instead of preparing China’s public and its health care system for a managed reopening, the government exhausted valuable resources in 2022 trying to contain the virus until it couldn’t do so, the article said.
The post was censored shortly after; keyword searches on China’s social media websites returned no results.
The text’s popularity seemed to stem from the fact that the Chinese leadership, which had successfully managed the pandemic for two years, refused to consider alternatives. When its hand was forced by the highly transmissible Omicron strain, and by growing unrest over the restrictive policies, large sections of China’s 1.4 billion people were left more vulnerable than they otherwise should’ve been.
“By the second half of 2020, it was basically confirmed that ‘the virus won’t disappear.’ At the time, the strategy was to accelerate vaccine development in the hope that vaccination would be followed by reopening,” the article said. Instead, the government’s decision to lock down the major port city of Shanghai this past spring became a “landmark turning point,” it said.
“If Shanghai could be locked down, where else couldn’t be locked down?” the author continued. “After that, excessive prevention and control measures emerged in various places, and widespread nucleic acid testing became the norm.”
“If we had admitted in August and September last year that coexistence [with the virus] was an unavoidable outcome, and begun to actively prepare and look for opportunities to adjust our strategy and direction, we might have finished the adjustment in March and April this year, and the peak might have passed by now,” the author concluded.
“We might have basically kept pace with other countries, putting our country in a more favorable and proactive position to compete globally,” the post said.
Zhang’s candid early advice would’ve seemed prescient to many, especially since Chinese propaganda’s 180-degree turn to assure the public that COVID infections are manageable without a run on the hospitals, just weeks after insisting Xi’s zero-COVID policy was the only way to prevent mass fatalities like those in the West.
As China finally exits pandemic strictures, the reputation of China’s Fauci may be just as important, if not more so, than those on the country’s COVID task force, experts who have since come in for criticism for abruptly changing their tone on the virus.
Over the weekend, China’s social media websites carried a video of Zhang at a press conference in Shanghai, where he predicted the city’s COVID peak would arrive in three to four weeks. “It’s very normal that this day has come, because [the virus] has already been around the world,” he said in the clip.
On Monday, Zhang coauthored a viral post published on his department’s official WeChat account.
“China is the last country to exit strict COVID controls in the pandemic. It is also the country that has maintained the lowest number of critical cases and deaths,” it said. “But now we still have to face the challenge of widespread infections during the exit.”
“We are about to emerge from a three-year fight against the virus. Air, sunshine and freedom of travel await us,” the post read.
Do you have a tip on a world news story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about China’s COVID-19 policies? Let us know via worldnews@newsweek.com.
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